Joe Gracey writes:
>There is no substitute for a 60s-era soul review. Take my word for it.
Okay, as sad as it is, I'll provide a bookend to Joe's James Brown
story. The year was 1988. I had graduated from college about a year
earlier and was working and teaching bass at a local musical instrument
store in Keene, New Hampshire. A local promoter was booking a few shows
at the county fairgrounds that summer, one of which was a bill featuring
Johnny Rivers, Chuck Berry, Carl Perkins, Roy Orbison, and James Brown.
I'm not a *huge* Johnny Rivers fan (other than "Secret Agent Man," that
is) but was nuts for everyone else on the bill. And Rivers *is* a good
performer, no doubt about it, and everyone else was great, too. Hell,
even Chuck Berry turned in a fine performance.
So James is the final performer of the day and his band comes out
and starts playing funk instrumentals. James' personal problems were
well-known during this period (he was awaiting trial for his famous car
chase at that time and was also known to be having marital problems) and
there was a lot of curiosity as to how the performance would go. So the
band is playing...and playing...and playing. This goes on for about
thirty minutes and there's no James Brown yet. People are starting to
get a little worried and then Brown finally comes out and turned in a
fine performance. Not quite great, and he was a little more incoherent
than I'd expected, but certainly nothing to be embarassed by.
Meanwhile, outside of town, James' estranged wife had come up to New
Hampshire and tried to burn down the motel where James and his band were
staying, not knowing that he was at the fairgrounds at the time. She was
caught and charged with attempted arson, though I can't remember what the
end result of that was.
A couple of days later I was at work and a friend of mine came into
the store. Said friend worked on the sound crew at the show and was
telling me about what it was like backstage. We ended up talking about
the arson thing that James' wife had been arrested for and he proceeded
to tell me some horror stories about what it was like backstage before
Brown's set. I really don't want to get into what he told me *too* much
because none of it would come as a huge surprise at this point and James
has admirably stuck to the straight-and-narrow in the intervening years.
Safe to say, though, there was a good reason why the band was playing
instrumental vamps for a half-hour before he finally went onstage. I was
really impressed that the performance was as good as it was after hearing
my friend's backstage stories.
I truly wish I'd seen Brown in the '60s. A few years back PBS ran
an old b&w videotape of his 1968 Boston TV performance the evening of
Martin Luther King's death; one of the most amazing TV concerts I've ever
seen. The anger and energy in the audience came through loud and clear,
twenty-five years after the original event. The way that Brown and
Boston's then-mayor Kevin White handled the situation onstage saved
Boston a lot of destruction that a lot of other cities weren't as lucky
to avoid.
--Jon Johnson
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Wollaston, Massachusetts
